Dear Internet,
Imagine
if you will a school in Japan so horribly ruined that the teachers are afraid
for their lives. The students play
mahjong and poker during class. They
smoke and carry lead pipes while walking the halls. Gangs abound and destroy the building. When a new teacher gets hired, he is told not
to become too hopeful with the situation.
When he tries to correct the behavior of the students, he is thrown out
a fourth floor window. That is the
setting for "Kamen Teacher," a manga from the mind of Tooru Fujisawa
who also penned "Great Teacher Onizuka." What follows is an action packed lesson in discipline.
With
such a destructive setting it brings into question why the school had not
folded in upon itself, especially since it is being herald as the worst of its
kind. That only brings into question
just how many of these schools there are that seem to be ruled by the inmates. Enter, Jumonji Hayato, a masked teacher who
hands out supplementary lessons in the form of corporeal punishment that leaves
the student with enough bruises that he looks like the last orange at the super
market after everyone has squeezed it lumpy.
If they fail his lesson, Jumonji buzz cuts his initials onto the heads
of his students so that all can know the lesson he instilled in them. Eventually, the students are shaving their
heads and wearing wigs to hide their shame.
"Kamen
Teacher" has a lot going for it.
The premise is wild and crazy enough that you know it is going to be
filled with ridiculous levels of craziness.
Everything from exploding vehicles and a fighting sequence featuring a
Segway makes it into this manga. Everything
action oriented is well over the top and is rightfully so. The only way that it could go any farther is
if it leapt into the world of fantasy.
What makes it even better is the top notch level of drawings. Everything is pristinely drawn and filled
with detail. Backgrounds are full of
little nuances and do not often go blank or black. When they do, it is only because the rest of
the panels are being given priority or that there is not enough room in the
panel to do so.
Beyond
art, there is a central problem that "Kamen Teacher" tries
desperately to point out. There is a
real problem with the schools of Japan.
Between bullying, high suicide rates, a broken school system that
fixates on rote memorization instead of understanding the fact, and a plethora
of other problems, many of which can be found in other countries individually,
the Japanese student has much weighing them down. It is amazing that any of them can come out
as functioning adults. "Kamen
Teacher" begins to examine such facets. It identifies the problem, but it also goes to
the root of the problem. Going back to
the plot summary, Jumonji deals out physical punishment to the delinquents who
use the same methods to each other and the adults around them. This enters into the bigger gun fallacy. If the person you are correcting uses force,
than you must use a bigger force against them to placate them. The problem with this is that it only works
for the short term, and not very well.
Eventually the underdog force will find a way to strengthen itself to
overpower the dominant force. It leads
to escalation more than anything else.
Jumonji
is well aware of this, especially if it could rebound onto the other teachers
at the school. Instead, he tries to find
the root of the problem. He attempts to
identify the reason that there is no unity among the students of the
class. This includes finding out what occurred
before he was hired to teach. By
learning about his students at a personal level and not treating them as a
group of stereotypes, Jumonji is able to truly help them. That does not mean bonding with them or
gaining their trust. It would be
laughable to say that most of the students really liked Jumonji by the
end. With that I have come to a point
that I have forgotten to mention.
Jumonji
is an alter ego. There is no real
surprise to this. Jumonji is a masked
teacher who is really Gota Araki, the homeroom teacher for class 2-C. To a certain extent they are the same person,
but at the same extent they play two different roles. While Gota is able to actually teach the
students the material and serve as the comic relief, Jumonji acts as the
imposing figure that is able to guide the students when they want to push
back. There definitely needs to be a distinct
seperation between the two, epically because the ending. By the end, it is the will and mask of
Jumonji that is passed on to others who would bear it.
Just by
the time that "Kamen Teacher" found a place to settle, its run ran
out. You can tell that the series got
canned by how abruptly it ended. The
story showed that it very well could have featured each and every student in
the class and the life they had outside the school. Only two of the students out of the class
were given this treatment. The second
one featured Gota learning on a personal level with one student instead of
going a roundabout way as he did with the first. It seemed very much to me that the manga was
going to turn into a weekly series about Gota learning about the various
problems his students were going through and utilizing Jumonji to aid them,
while at the same time watching them turn into good adults. Instead the manga ends quickly in two or
three issues. What it does with that
quick ending is something that questions the solutions that people are willing
to go to fix the situation of Japanese schools.
The
ending, if you want to know, brings to light that there are numerous other
cases across Japan of other individuals appearing at schools as masked
teachers. The reason for this is not
some sort of government funded program or a secret organization trying to correct
wayward youth, but it is because the final straw is falling for the common
citizen. The common citizen, with no
outside influence other than hearing stories of it elsewhere, is donning the
mask and correcting the youth. The mask
acts a protector of their identity and allows them to acts without fear. The government and the school system are
unable to correct the problem, so it falls to the average person to fix the
problem. In a way, "Kamen
Teacher" asks when the final straw falls what will Japan and its people do
when confronted with their falling young adults. Will they examine the problem at an
individual level by treating the problem by working with the individual and
treating them as such, or will they continue to administer broad sweeping generalized
reform that manages people like gingerbread men, all coming from the same
mold? Time will tell.
"Kamen
Teacher" is a good manga that did not go on long enough to fully spread
its wings. What it is able to do in its
limited run is confront only a few of the many problems that plague the
Japanese schools and the students that make it up. You can even say it criticizes the adults
that teach there if you look close enough.
Sadly, it brief run limited its range of possibilities. What "Kamen Teacher" does cover, it
does well.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
P.S. Tomorrow is the film "Funny Girl."
P.S. Tomorrow is the film "Funny Girl."
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